The FreeBSD Diary

The new labels are in! On Wednesday of last week, I ordered some labels from get-it-low on eBay. They shipped on Thursday, and they arrived today (Monday). The item is listed as New Quantum ATL SDLT DLT Bar Code Labels Tag 6210201-02 and sold for $9.99 plus $5.84 shipping, for a total of $15.83 USD.

These labels are for the 220+ DLT labels which I obtained from a friend (he knows who he is). They were decommissioning a whole bunch of DLT drives and these tapes were surplus. Rather than trash them, he overwrote them, several times with different streams of 1s and 0s. Then gave them to me. However, with a tape library which contains a bar-code label, you pretty much want barcodes.

Back in May I asked if any of the Bacula users happened to have a bunch of labels sitting around unused. People like to help, especially when you are providing a service to them. I didn't get any takers, but I did get some suggestions for printing. Printing labels is a hassle, not that I've ever done it. This was back in May of this year. I did nothing.

Come last week, I decided it was time to ask again, given that I had my tape library operational again. No takers. Actually, one person did contact me off-list, and for that I am grateful. But I had already ordered. Compared to printing, cutting, etc, these labels are great.

Over the next few days, I'll be setting up CopyJob on my Bacula installation. Jobs will be copied from my disk backups to my tapes. With this setup, I'll be moving backups off-site on a regular basis, but keeping the original backups on local HDD. Should the HDD array ever suffer a catastrophic failure, I'll still have backups somewhere else. Plus, I just think it's neat having a functioning tape library.

I've already created a few new Pool resources to take care of these new backups.

Pool {
  Name             = Fulls
  Pool Type        = Backup
  Recycle          = yes
  AutoPrune        = yes
  Volume Retention = 3 years
  Storage          = DigitalTapeLibrary

}

Pool {
  Name             = Incrementals
  Pool Type        = Backup
  Recycle          = yes
  AutoPrune        = yes
  Volume Retention = 3 months
  Storage          = DigitalTapeLibrary

}

Pool {
  Name             = Differentials
  Pool Type        = Backup
  Recycle          = yes
  AutoPrune        = yes
  Volume Retention = 3 months
  Storage          = DigitalTapeLibrary

#  and incremental backups other days
Schedule {
  Name = "WeeklyCycle"
  Run = Level=Full 1st sun at 5:55
  Run = Differential 2nd-5th sun at 5:55
  Run = Incremental mon-sat at 5:55
}

Why keep differential for 3 months if I run monthly backups? Because I can. Sometimes a file changes several times in a month, let alone a week. If we can keep copies of that around, why not? A similar argument applies to the incremental backups, which are run every day.

I'll work through all this in the coming dates.

I have about 220 recently acquired tapes and about 100 tapes I've had for a few years. Let's take the uncompressed value: 35GB. With 320 tapes, that's 11200GB, or 11TB. Assuming a compression factor of 50%, this becomes nearly 16TB. I have more storage on tape than I do on HDD.